Some Lies Are The Necessary Ones
by Mrs Ronald Weasley
Summary: Because some lies are the necessary ones. Edward/Bella/Carlisle. Edward/Carlisle. DON'T LIKE? DON'T READ! Rating for some slash sexual content and angst. Written for my Twilight20 prompt: Lies. Complete.


**Some Lies are the Necessary Ones**

Author: Mrs Ronald Weasley

Rating: R or M

Pairing/s: Edward/Bella/Carlisle, Edward/Carlisle

Category: Angst/Drama

Warnings: Slash sexual content

Spoilers: None

Summary: Because some lies are the necessary ones.

A/N: Written for my Twilight20 prompt: Lies.

Down in the village, the bells of the church are ringing, selfish little peals of laughter that trill and croon to themselves across a white morning. They wake her, not enough that she swims up out of sleep entirely, but still the clamour and light of the world stirring come to her muted and facetious as if half-dreamed.

She can hear footsteps that, from her blue cocoon of flannel bedding, sound as if they begin far away; she knows they are really only as distant as the staircase, perilously steep and ludicrously narrow, at the end of the corridor.

After a moment the footsteps cease, and then, much nearer, now, there are hushed voices conferring outside the door.

"Do you think we should?"

"Come on Carlisle, why not?"

"She's sleeping."

"She's slept long enough."

The hinges squeak and the floorboards groan, and they crawl onto the bed, jostling each other, rousing her with their freezing fingers pressed to her throat, her eyelids.

"Wake up, Bella." Squirming, grinning, she attempts to burrow deeper into the blankets, but they poke her and tickle and growl until she opens her eyes and gives a half-hearted glare. She mumbles something like 'go away', but turns over onto her side and smiles to see their faces so close to her own, rapidly melting bits of snow clinging to their hair.

"Come outside with us Bella." A glance out the window tells her that the countryside is indeed frosted and virginal, and perhaps a walk wouldn't be so had.

Her hand slips through her own hair, wild, knotted, and she says, "Fine. Hand me my jeans, will you?"

Her muscles seem to have forgotten the things they once knew so effortlessly; a snowball is clumsy; she has to try to shape and guide it, though one does sail rather superbly into the side of Edward's head. They navigate along the frozen creek behind the house, counting the tracks that some small animal has left in the bank.

At length they emerge from the woods and come out on top of a modest hill that overlooks another forest, and a field, and the smoking-chimney rooftops of the town at the end of the road. Everything is bright, clean. It's a kind of peace all its own simply to stand and be there, with her lovers on a Sunday morning.

Above her, above them, the timid sky behind the clouds is pale and purple-grey; a flock of starlings lifts above a thicket of oak trees to the west, rising and bending and unfurling against the slight wind as one independent beating wing.

There is a stillness, suddenly, odd and trembling and brief, and she is aware of it, reaching to grasp Carlisle's un-gloved hand inside her own.

Down in the village the church bells are ringing.

Nothing, now, she has learned, is entirely platonic.

Across the room Bella sees Carlisle and Edward shrugging off their coats, speaking to each other, laughing, their conversation lost to her in the lively buzz of voices in the room. She sees Carlisle lift his hand, his fingertips barely brushing Edward's jaw. He adjusts the crooked line of Edward's collar.

Her stomach twisting in anxiety, Bella feels as if she is watching a strange and tender pantomime.

She'll remember all her life the lightness of it, the sureness of Edward's hand on Carlisle's wrist. She will be walking alone, unhurried, on a sloping street in Florida, and she will see a man kissing his wife goodbye on the front step of their house, her face turned toward him, shining like an ordinary sun; she will remember it then.

All that night Bella lay awake, listening for sounds she might have missed before, and heard nothing but the humming of the fan. Even so, she imagined that the sound of the rain on the windows was the wet sound of lips parting, of kisses, and tossed in her bed until dawn.

All her life she has lived beside, and within, fictional characters and their romances. Between the closed covers of her dog-eared volumes they fall into loves masquerading as desire, fall out of 

desires playing at love. She feels she ought to know this terrain, then, but she doesn't, and it is something new and exquisite, perplexing despite all she's read.

Nothing prepares her for the slow-subtle shift of her heart; yes, that, the one they've told her she has, that beats and beats away in her chest but never makes anything easier, not living, not this, when, after she's had her nipples pinched, sucked and pulled between them, she lies down full of the knowledge of them.

Sometime during the night Bella wakes and pulls herself from the empty bed. Wearing Edward's t-shirt, her legs bare, she creeps downstairs and out into the chill November evening. The grass is wet, silver-looking under the too-bright moonlight, so she settles herself in a wicker chair on the patio, ignoring the goose-pimples rising all over her body. She can't quite shake the bizarre feeling she has that everyone she knows has gone away in the dark, and this is the lonely, quiet world she'll have to inhabit from now on.

There is a softness in what they do with each other that extends beyond what they've let her see of their mouths, their hands, that is clearer when both of them lie beside her, and smell like sex.

The way they peruse one another, Carlisle looking up, waiting for the quick kiss Edward is sure to leave on his lips, taking reserve and assessing position; this is how much I have of you, this is how beautiful you are.

Does that make her a voyeur?

Once, she'd went into town, and when she returned, pushing the door open quietly with her hip because her arms were laden with grocery bags, she caught Edward bending Carlisle over the scrubbed pine table in the kitchen. Their backs were to her, but she could see enough to know what was happening; Carlisle's fingers shaking, and groping for purchase on the smooth surface of the table, moaning out Edward's name; Edward leaning down to murmur something against his temple, his long fingers reaching around to curl around Carlisle's erection, moving in him until Bella thinks she might break from looking at them too long.

She'd set the bags down, careful not to make any noise, and gone out the way she came in. Sat down on the swing and pushed herself back and forth until long after she'd seen them leave the kitchen.

Later, Bella would return to and curl against, the smooth parentheses of their bodies closed and complete.

In her room Bella takes down her hair from its plait, shaking her head so that it slides against her neck, touching her arms flirtatiously, softly, as a lover might. She undresses and stands in front of the mirror in only her panties, gauging the weight of her breasts and the slope of her stomach, the roundness of her thighs. It's been a long time since she's thought of anything to do with other men, the feel of their hands on her.

This is how she looks to them in their beds, pale and solid, not undesirable, but undesired.

An evening out, alone.

It doesn't take long, ten minutes after she's paid for her drink and sat in a corner booth sipping it uneasily, a man who reminds her not unfavourably of her father approaches her and offers to buy her another. He's older, with longish brown hair and wide, kind eyes, and after they've talked for half an hour about his thesis on Shakespearean sonnets, Bella finds herself following him out onto the street, suddenly shy under the streetlamps, knowing the snow must be catching in her hair.

He leads her around the corner and begins kissing her before she realizes what she's doing; by then, he's leaning her up against the side of the building and breathlessly asking her permission.

She nods, and bites her lip, and arches her back, the cold from the stone wall seeping through her clothes; his hand worrying the hem of her skirt, cupping her bare knee, sliding under and then higher. Her face pressed against his lapel, her own hands filled with the cloth of his coat, her ears with her moan. Then the trembling, and the legs that would buckle beneath her but for his arm about her waist, and the harsh gasp she barely recognizes as belonging to her. Her open mouth hot against the fine stubble on his chin. A portrait. Woman, undone.

She expects him to ask her back to his apartment afterward, but instead he puts her skirt right and smoothes the tangle of her hair. It's only after he's kissed her once more and gone back inside that she realizes she never asked him his name.

The last thing she wanted was tenderness from a stranger.

By the time she pulls up their driveway, she's feeling more combative than she has since she was seventeen and attacked Jacob for kissing her. So it's unlucky for the two of them, even if it isn't really intended to hurt her, that they're lying naked on the bed when she storms in, takes one look, and starts to cry.

In the darkness of the house she approaches the bed. She is wearing a coat, and she carries nothing, although she feels she ought to have something to set down on the pillow; a handkerchief, perhaps, a flower, a length of hair. Some intimate gesture, a token meant to convey love in all its depths, despite the giver having fled in the night.

She has no real talent for poetry, nor sentimentality.

What would they think were they to return now and see her, a winter-dressed shadow standing over the bed? Would they pull her into their arms together and tug her down to lie between them, covering her face with their cool breaths? Or would they ask questions, cause a scene, keep her from leaving though the car is idling outside?

"I was," she says at last, looking at a picture of the three of them in the mottled half-light of the dawn, "always afraid that you would love each other more than me."

Dear Edward. Dear Carlisle.

I said I would live with you because of the way you looked at me after the first time we made love; I saw something like hope burning in your eyes, and I knew mine must have looked the same.

For the most part I found myself deeply in love with the both of you.

So don't ask me why I'm going now. I'm not sure I could tell you myself, but believe me when I say I need to.

I do know one thing, though. I did love you and do love you, and I always will. Be happy together.

I'll see you when I can.

Bella

Half a dozen offers for positions at the University, good ones that mean decent coffee and a windowed office, and each day Isabella Swan finds herself in the cramped bookshop just round the corner from her apartment, selling used copies of Romeo and Juliet.

It's far from perfect, but good all the same when, once a week on Fridays, Carlisle calls and asks carefully how she is.

"Are you happy, Bella?"

It is not an easy question to answer, and for a moment it overwhelms her, seeming to encompass the whole of her life up to this point, this moment. She looks down at the landscape of herself half-dressed, a woman-continent, circumscribed by the steady looping movement of a clever tongue, which, in the bruised-seeming glow just before twilight descends, could almost be the colour of rose petals, and is just as soft where it brushes the skin of her belly.

A sea through which no man sails.

"Yes. I think so. I mean, I'm trying to be."

Some lies are the necessary ones.


End file.
